Apparently there has been an eruption on the west side of the mountain.
I don't know what the extent is. There's about a third of the mountain that's covered with clouds.
And we just don't know what has happened at this time.
Over the next few days, earthquakes and small eruptions continue,
and more sightseers come to witness a volcano in action.
How long does this rubber last?
It lasted about two minutes and it occurred about three minutes ago.
April 3rd, Washington Governor Dixie Lee Ray declares a state of emergency and the warnings go out.
You're going to have to go and the faster the better. One time, one thing, you've got to go.
People living near Mount St. Helens are kept from their homes and cabins as a precaution.
I have about $7,000 in snow over this area.
And my cabin. And my room size.
Under my own responsibility, I go up and get them.
Hey, we wouldn't be in there ten minutes.
That's all the longer it takes us to go in there is about ten minutes and get the hell out.
By mid-May, many of the curious have left, thinking it's all much ado about nothing.
Battai and Marianna Kearney are on volcano watch for the Office of Emergency Services, Manning Radios,
watching for any subtle change.
They'd set up camp just eight miles from the mountain on a ridge above the south fork of the Toodle River.
After seven days in the fog and rain, the Kearneys are ready for something to happen,
but they have no idea what lies in store.
Just after 8.30 in the morning, May 18th, another earthquake, this one larger than any the Kearneys had yet felt.
I was sitting in our Dodge van, and the whole darn van was shaking.
I couldn't look out because we'd just got through having breakfast and all the windows inside were steamed up.
But Marianna was outside, and she was sitting in her chair there and stood up,
and she was making a sketch of the mountain when this happened.
The cataclysmic eruption is underway.
An immense avalanche from the volcano's north slope is followed by an explosive eruption.
It opens up the north side of the mountain and then shoots straight up toward the sky.
The sustained lateral blast sends hot gas and rock from the volcano at hurricane speeds,
with devastation spreading nearly 16 miles from the volcano's crater.
Nearer the mountain, massive deposits of rock and ice from the avalanche were followed by intensely hot flows of gas, rock, and mud.
And it went up, and it was like a big steam puff out of a locomotive just went straight up like that, black and ugly, and that really scared us.
And that was the very start of it. I saw the start, you know, and then it just grew so incredibly fast.
I've never seen anything like it in my life. I don't expect to again.
The Kearneys have just enough time to radio a warning call, pack up and drive out down windy logging roads.
As they make their last dash to safety, they question if they'll make it out alive.
Like being in an eclipse along the edge of one and looking out and seeing the light beyond.
I was so dazed for a long time that I don't know if I was even scared, but I reached a point down the road where I saw all these multiple ash columns coming up in front of Goat Mountain.
I could see no ceiling on it. I looked out the van windows, there was just the gray, huge mass, you know, and I thought, are we going to get out of this or are we going to die?
The question of survival is even more in doubt for freelance photographer David Crockett. His escape route is blocked by the mud flows.
No other option. He begins walking toward his only glimpse of hope, a tiny sliver of light in the ash-blackened sky.
He rolls his video camera, capturing what he thinks are his last moments on Earth.
I never really thought I'd believe this or say this, but at this moment, I honestly believe I'm dead.
There's really no way to describe those feelings. I feel the ash now in my eyes. It's getting very hard to breathe, burnt to breathe.
It burns my eyes.
Oh dear God. My God, this is hell.
Like the Kearneys, Crockett made it out alive, but many people were not as lucky. In all, 57 people died on May 18th and the days thereafter.
Thousands of acres of forest are flattened, roads covered in hundreds of feet in ash and mud, logging equipment, homes, everything destroyed.
The mud flow continues down the Toutle River all the way to the mouth of the Columbia, stranding ocean-going freighters in silt.
Once again, Mount St. Helens erupted at about 8.36 this morning, sending plumes of ash, traveling 10 miles into the atmosphere covering the Washington area.
KEPP television news anchor Mike Ramirez brings the news of the eruption to people in central Washington.
Again, the greatest danger is not here in our area of central Washington, but of course right near the mountain.
What started as a typical spring day in Washington turned into something very bizarre as we have been reporting.
The Spokane area also is receiving some of this ash, bringing the nearly darkness that triggered streetlights in several cities.
While the region escapes the fury of the blast, the ash cloud is on its way.
But some people east of the mountain are duped by its appearance.
Don Thompson directed emergency services for the Yakima Chapter of the American Red Cross.
He was mowing his lawn when he got a call from the National Guard.
He says, well look out your back door, and I did. I said, Gary, it's going to rain like mad.
I see the lightning, I hear the thunder, and it is going to rain. He says, OK, dummy, I told you, it blew up.
These satellite photographs show how the prevailing winds carried the ash to Yakima, across Washington State, and eventually around the globe.
It was a bright sunny morning at one minute, and just an hour or two later it was dark.
Retired KIT radio newsman Al Bell says the eruption of Mount St. Helens is the single biggest news story he covered in his 45 years in broadcasting.
That afternoon, the station's entire news staff was called in, and they began informing listeners about what was happening.
KIT AM and CATS FM urges everyone to not panic. We are in touch with proper county and city officials for advisory information.
We will remain on the air as a clearinghouse for this emergency vital information.
Bell and the KIT news team gave the Yakima Valley as much information as they could provide.
They broadcasted commercial free for the next five days, trying to sort out the fact from the rumor and the fear from the reality.
Tremendous amount of misinformation, and again, a lot of it was because we had nothing to go back and refer to.
I remember calling the health officer, the county health officer, and I said, you know, we would really like to have you tell us something.
And he says, you know, I really don't have anything to tell you. He was in the same boat the rest of us were.
For KAPP reporters Craig Allen and Denise Boyer, May 18th was a very long day.
Earlier today, we had an accumulation of up to about a half an inch, I would say, right here. Now it's even more than that.
In some places here, it's drifted to an inch high. This volcanic ash, it's very fine.
It looks in a way glass like, kind of like sand you get on the beach.
It's very fine. And again, as we said, it gets in your hair, it gets in your clothes everywhere.
And we're going to get it for quite a while longer.
The first thing, a memory that it brings back is how much thinner I was 20 years ago.
But what memories it brings back is, I would say, the drama of this event and what it really meant to the people of Yakima.
Allen is now a journalism professor at Arizona State University, far removed from the Yakima Valley,
and the disaster he worked so hard to inform viewers about 20 years ago.
This was a few hours after the eruption, and even though it is probably around 3 o'clock or so in the afternoon,
as you can see, it is pitch black outside.
Allen and Boyer spent much of the day driving around Yakima, from the hospitals to city hall,
trying to gather as much information as possible.
We're going to have another wave of volcanic ash here over the next couple of hours.
Denise, what do you have for us? You have some closures here.
You've been talking to people the last few hours. What do you have going for us?
That's right, Craig. I've been sitting by the phone for at least the last hour, and a lot of, we just had a flood of phone calls come in.
We had a ton of information. I mean, we had just stacks of notices and things that needed to be conveyed.
And as you can see, you probably noticed right there, I was shaking the card because the ash was continuing to come down.
As we were doing the live shot.
While the north and the west sides of the volcano felt the brunt of the eruption's force, the ash cloud was blown due east.
And while areas like the Tri-Cities were relatively spared, Yakima was covered in a dense layer of gray, sand-like material.
And when the sun finally broke through days later, residents there began to ask themselves, how do we get out of this mess?
It became quite a community-wide event.
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This Memorial Day weekend at the Greenway Automall, they're out of here!
Every car, every truck, every van, every SUV, both new and used, are specially marked to move by Monday night.
We want them out of here!
Right now at Lynch, GMC, driver brand new 2000 Sonoma Extended Cab for $14,999 early $2.92 a month.
With these deals come Monday night, they'll be out of here.
Hurry for the best selection and remember, we'll get you financed.
At Bob Hall's Greenway Automall next to Wal-Mart in Yakima.
Tonight on Local News at 6.
We'll show you how people in the region chose to honor the men and women who fought for our freedom on this Memorial Day weekend.
Plus, we'll take you out to the Onion Man Triathlon.
Doesn't have anything to do with eating onions, but there's a lot of sweat and a few tears.
Join us tonight at 6.
[♪upbeat music playing
Cap ABC, total news coverage.
Looking at Mount St. Helens today, you can see how the blast has scarred the landscape.
Most of the northwest side of the mountain is gone.
Spirit Lake is jammed with logs.
And a trail of destruction winds down the Tudor River Valley.
But it was that dirty, gritty ash that people in central Washington remember most.
It was a time when day turned to night.
We did not think in terms of it having a major impact on our community.
Dick Zeiss had been Yakima's city manager for less than a year when he faced the challenge of a lifetime.
Soon after the news of the eruption began to break, he assembled city staff and began planning for the fallout.
I had contacted our library at the time.
The library director's retired, Mr. Ostrander, and asked him if he could find any evidence.
Somewhere in the library archives, internationally or nationally, about an urban area that was impacted by an ash fall.
He came back a few hours later and said, you're going to be the model for the future.
It doesn't really exist in modern times.
Don Thompson and the Red Cross opened emergency shelters in Sunnyside, Yakima, and Natchez.
The highways were closed and hundreds of travelers were stuck in the valley with no place to stay.
What we were finding for one thing was the elderly people said by the clock it's supposed to be daylight and it's not, so we're going to go to a shelter.
And they'd sit in the shelter until the clock said it's supposed to be dark outside, they'd go home.
We had other people who ran out of medicine, had appointments to make, and they ended up calling and we tried to be everything we could to everybody else.
So we were dealing with something that we knew very little about and we were trying to cope with that and trying to figure out was the ash dangerous, how do you solve all these problems that it caused.
It just had so many angles, so many different things that you had to work through that it just became a tremendously big story.
Bell and Craig Allen knew that this was the story of a lifetime.
This was the epitome, I mean this was like the Hindenburg disaster or the assassination of Kennedy, something like that.
I mean no question about it, we were pumped.
And the rest of the world knew it too, focused its attention on Yakima.
News organizations from across the globe called in looking for the story.
And we were getting calls every day from ABC, get his tape, get his tape.
And we had a heck of a time, a very difficult time getting tape out to the network to cover that.
But then toward the end of the week, one of the tapes we did get out was to this obscure agency and they called me up and they gave me their name and it was C something, C something, I couldn't remember it.
But finally I sent a tape out to this obscure little news function that had called from this obscure location in Georgia, got it out and it was CNN.
And this was one of the first stories that was ever carried on CNN because they had gone on the air about three or four days before that or a week or so before that.
One thing kind of humorous about it was the first thing a lot of them wanted to know was how many people had been killed, how many people were dead there in Yakima.
And I said none. So they immediately lost interest. It wasn't such a big story. Oh really?
You know they were mildly interested then but they would have liked it I think from a news standpoint a lot better if I could have said oh we've had 20 dead and all this kind of thing but of course we didn't.
While no one died, Yakima had quite a mess on its hands. With the state's emergency resources tied up dealing with the death and destruction on the volcano's west side, city manager Dick Zase knew Yakima was on its own.
He ordered resources in from other communities. Trucks came from as far as California. Public works crews removed the ash around the clock.
Altogether we moved over 650,000 tons of ash off of rooftops, off of buildings, off of the parking lots, the streets, the sidewalks. So it was a tremendous effort to relocate that.
They dumped a quarter million tons of ash at what is now Yakima's Chesterly Park. Another quarter million tons now fills the infield of the fairgrounds.
The abrasive, clogging ash caused two million dollars in damage to Yakima's wastewater treatment center and another two million was spent on the cleanup.
Zase says he's often asked if he knew at the time how the city would pay for it all.
The answer I gave then and it's still the same is I couldn't worry about it at the time. I knew I had sufficient capacity if necessary to issue debt or to borrow funds from other sources and that this was an emergency that would have some recovery of state and federal emergency disaster relief.
The message to me was get this community back online and we'll figure out how to finance it and pay for it later.
And that's just what they did. Al Bell says the community came together and together they overcame adversity.
It became quite a community wide event and everybody kind of cleaned up their yards and everything and it became kind of a community pride thing.
But it was remarkable within 10 days here what we accomplished in terms of cleaning this community up and having as much done in that short amount of time as was possible.
And it couldn't have been done without the help and support of the community residents, citizens, business people and employees and city, county, state, federal, state government that all worked together here in such a cooperative way.
And I think that really was the effort that made it all possible.
Washington Transportation Secretary Sid Morrison is also a Zilla area farmer. In 1980 he was a state senator running for the U.S. Congress.
The campaign came to a screeching halt and we shifted all the efforts of all the farmers who couldn't do anything in the fields anyway.
And we mobilized a lot of equipment to do things like help the city, help the county move a lot of ash to the fallout.
Actually it wasn't ash, it was more like sand, very, very heavy sand.
After Morrison was elected to Congress he helped establish the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.
I didn't have a lot of experience in doing this. So what do you do? Do you have the park service run it? Is this some place that people come to visit?
Do you have the forest service run it? Because it was the forests that were decimated, many of them private, some of them public.
And the decision was to stay with the forest service and have this be a research project of how forests regenerate themselves.
In the end Congress set aside 110,000 acres around the volcano, an area to be protected for research, recreation and education.
I think over time we'll not only see the wonders of nature and the amazing force of nature,
but we'll be able to know a lot more about how Mother Nature recovers from volcanic action and how we can help Mother Nature.
Over the past 20 years this National Volcanic Monument has grown. Millions of people visit here every year.
And when we come back we'll find out what this place has to offer and why people are so fascinated by this volcano in our own backyard.
Look at this. I'm storming and this is what they're going to feed us.
We're going to eat this one from videotape. Congratulations. Congratulations and the best for you. Beautiful wedding.
We're heading straight to IHOP. For a satisfying meal come to IHOP and enjoy a T-Bone steak with your choice of potato, vegetables and super salad.
Memorial Day weekend at the Greenway Auto Mall. They're out of here. Every car, every truck, every van, every SUV, both new and used, are specially marked to move by Monday night.
We want them out of here. At Sunfair Chevrolet, a new S10 pickup only $159 a month or a brand new Cavalier only $183 a month.
With these deals come Monday night. They'll be out of here. Hurry for the best selection and remember we'll get you financed.
At Bob Hall's Greenway Auto Mall next to Wal-Mart in Yakima.
I'm a champion. Me too. I'm a champion. We're champions. I'm a champion. And I am too. I'm... no, he's the champion.
Be a champion for kids in the Yakima and Kittitas Valleys. Watch CMM Champions live on CAB ABC on June 3rd and 4th. All the money raised will help kids at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital and Children's Hospital in Seattle.
How is everybody today?
Each year, 3 million people visit the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. They come from Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Seattle, Portland and all across the world.
On this glorious day, visitors witness a spectacular view just like it was that morning on May 18th, 20 years ago.
This is a beautiful view here today folks. I want you to recognize that because 200 days out of the year you can't even see the valley floor from here.
Folks come now to remember the places that they used to see for those that were here prior to the eruption and they come here to learn about the effects that the eruption had on the landscape.
Oni Tippett manages the Forest Service's three Mount St. Helens visitor centers.
There aren't too many places where a volcano has erupted in folks' backyards literally in their lifetimes and it's a wonderful opportunity to learn about that and watch not only the effects of that,
but all of the things that have been happening in 20 years since that eruption occurred.
Previously I've been told that it was still kind of a gray wasteland, that I come here and I see a lot of growth.
But a lot of improvement has been done and government is taking keen interest for the visitors and for the tourists.
It's taken nearly 20 years, but you can now access Mount St. Helens from all sides.
At the Windy Ridge Observatory you get a view from the east, standing above Spirit Lake, still clogged with the millions of trees knocked down by the blast.
From the north you can look straight into the volcano's crater from the Johnston Ridge Observatory.
This newest visitor center is built on the site where U.S. Geological Survey geologist David Johnston lost his life.
Inside, displays teach about every aspect of the volcano.
Visitors now come to the monument by the busload to take pictures.
Hike on the monument's hundreds of trails.
Take in the raw beauty of this incredible landscape.
And of course, buy souvenirs.
It was nice that they had made it so accessible and we were hoping that lots of people were going to be able to get in here and see it.
These families came down from Seattle to visit the mountain, have a picnic lunch.
I think it's beautiful, even with the destruction.
And teach the next generation about the volcano.
We went to the visitor center and watched the movie about the eruption which was incredible and he was riveted.
Is that right? It was a little frightening? But it was pretty impressive.
In 1992, the Spirit Lake Memorial Highway was completed, stretching from I-5 on the west to Johnston Ridge, deep within the blast zone.
It provides a premier bicycling route. Can you imagine a more impressive destination?
The volcano brought Bill Tai all the way from Pennsylvania.
It's just awe-inspiring. I have never seen this before. I'd seen it 19 years ago on TV, but of course, there's nothing like being here.
After people living along the Tuddle River Valley dug themselves out of the mud and ash, and people began flocking to Mount St. Helens to witness the destruction for themselves,
dozens of roadside souvenir stands and tourist attractions sprouted up. Just about everyone was selling bottles of ash.
Here, a half-buried A-frame cabin provides a place to pose for pictures, buy souvenirs, even offer helicopter tours of the blast area.
Build a giant statue of Bigfoot out of the ash and you've got a recipe for a tourist trap.
Entire towns are taking advantage of the fascination with our backyard volcano.
A sign at the entrance to the tiny southwest Washington-burg of Toledo hails it as the gateway to Mount St. Helens.
But Castle Rock on Interstate 5 actually owns that distinction.
Just 45 minutes from the Johnston Ridge Observatory, Castle Rock is the main entry point for people visiting the monument from western Washington and Oregon.
Ellen Rose is the owner of the Mount St. Helens Motel, where they hope you had a blast.
She's also the president of the Mount St. Helens Business Association.
Before the eruption, she says Castle Rock was a quiet logging and farming community, hardly even a stop on the interstate.
Since the eruption, things have changed.
Logging has steadily gone downhill. Farming is pretty much non-existent.
A lot of more tourism-related businesses coming in. Most of what you see up here is new since the eruption.
Rose says Castle Rock is enjoying a steady growth of visitors and new businesses.
It has restaurants, shops, even a Mount St. Helens movie theater.
She says her organization is here to promote the mountain and local business and make sure the state and federal government continue their commitments to the area.
I'm glad that Washington State is one that preserves a lot of the natural resources we have, the natural beauty that's here,
as well as, at least if it's a designated route to the mountain, you can kind of channel where people can go, how they can go see it.
And that's always, that's good for our area.
While Castle Rock will no doubt remain the gateway to the monument, there is a movement to make the mountain more accessible to visitors from the east.
State Transportation Department Secretary Sid Morrison.
One of my dreams was always to take the highway from where it ends above Spirit Lake now at the last observatory, Johnson Ridge, to be built,
and tie it over in some way, either into the White Pass Highway or into the highway that leads down into the Columbia River Gorge.
Yakima, Skamania and several other central Washington counties are currently funding a study looking into just that.
They see it as a way to bring even more people to the mountain and bring them through their communities as well.
Wouldn't it be wonderful for our ever increasing interest in tourist trade if we could get them into the Columbia River Gorge,
up through the Yakima Valley, through the Tri-Cities and so forth.
People keep coming back to Mount St. Helens year after year because things are changing here so quickly.
This is Coldwater Lake and 20 years ago it didn't even exist.
That's why scientists are using the monument as a giant laboratory.
They're learning how Mother Nature repairs herself and watching as this once barren landscape comes back to life before our eyes.
The face of this landscape is on the verge of changing tremendously within a short time.
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How can you help fight crime in your neighborhood?
How about a round of golf?
Believe it or not, that's all it could take.
Hello, I'm Alex Peach from CAP ABC News.
And I'm Mark Peterson with the Yakima County Crime Stoppers and we'd like to invite you to the 7th annual Team Scramble at Sun Tide.
It's an 8 a.m. shotgun start.
Pick up a registration form at the Sheriff's Office or the Sun Tides Clubhouse.
So join us in tee-off against crime.
While there are spectacular days at Mount St. Helens, there are many more dreary ones. On this rainy, gray day, a group of scientists is trekking into the pumice plain.
While you can't see it, they are directly below Mount St. Helens' gaping mouth.
It is an area completely devastated by the eruption.
Twenty years after the eruption, you might think this area would be green again.
But Forest Service Ecologist Charlie Crisafulli says even this small amount of growth is pretty amazing when you consider the destruction a volcano can cause.
They represent perhaps the most extreme form of disturbance that a system can be exposed to.
So now Crisafulli and other researchers are watching what happens here.
They are seizing this opportunity to study life and how it responds to this kind of a drastic event.
What they have found so far is luck has a lot to do with what lives and what dies.
This is simply the fact that Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18th when there happened to be a lot of snow.
It afforded a lot of survivorship within the disturbed area.
Soon after the eruption, botanists began tracking plant species here.
This is the first plot of land studied.
For nearly 20 years, scientists have watched species grow in this small section of earth.
One of the plants that has fared the best is the prairie lupin.
Because of a relationship with the bacteria, together they create nitrogen other plants need to live on.
We see how lupin is paving the way for other species.
And we have now documented up to 35 other species that have come in after lupin have modified to sites.
There are other plants growing here.
The willows and other taller plant species are taking hold in thickets.
They provide shelter for animals and birds.
Chris Cifulli says 20 years after the eruption, the blast zone is about to explode with new life.
I think the face of this landscape is on the verge of changing tremendously within a short time.
Animals too are returning to Mount St. Helens.
Insects are helping to spread plant species through pollination.
The state has resumed planting lakes with trout.
Ground squirrels are a favorite of the visitors.
And herds of elk roam the monument freely.
But Chris Cifulli is learning the most from one of the smallest animal species, the northwestern salamander.
At the time of the eruption, lakes like this one, Meadow Lake, northeast of the mountain, were covered with thick layers of ice and snow.
They were buffered from the extreme heat of the eruption.
So the animal communities of frogs, salamanders, and insects deep below survived.
These lakes are teeming with life.
Forty glacial lakes survived the eruption and about 130 new lakes and ponds were formed.
Because amphibians like frogs and salamanders are a good judge of the health of an entire ecosystem,
Chris Cifulli and his team are paying particular attention to these little salamanders.
Chris Cifulli says salamanders lay their eggs underwater, and 15 months later, in the fall, they emerge and spread out over the landscape.
They can travel two or three miles.
So they're looking for cover, they're looking for places to secure prey, and that happens to be an insect prey base.
So they're watching how the salamanders disperse and make their way to new lakes formed by the eruption.
We have systematically gone through, one by one, and sampled which amphibians are there, whether or not they're breeding, and how many of them are present.
And we've looked through time how that's changed.
Nowhere else have scientists been able to start with brand new lakes and ponds and track the development and colonization of amphibians.
Chris Cifulli and his team say the work they're performing here at Mount St. Helens is vital to understanding how all ecosystems work.
And they're relating what they're learning to other areas where man has had a dramatic impact on the environment by sparking forest fires and clear-cutting land.
Now scientists are also watching Mount St. Helens closely to learn how volcanoes work.
Twenty years later, are we better prepared for the next eruption and are warning systems in place to let us know when the Big Bang may be coming?
Essentially anything that the volcano has done in the past is fair game for future eruptions.
Look at this. I'm starving and this is what they're going to feed us.
From videotape.
Congratulations.
Congratulations.
Beautiful wedding.
Since we leave here, we're heading straight to IHOP.
Okay.
For a satisfying meal, come to IHOP and enjoy a T-bone steak with your choice of potato, vegetables, and super salad.
This Memorial Day weekend at the Greenway Automall, they're out of here.
Every car, every truck, every van, every SUV, both new and used, are specially marked to move by Monday night.
We want them out of here.
A great selection of used cars includes a 94 Sunbird convertible or this like new 99 Dodge Avenger.
With these deals come Monday night, they'll be out of here.
Hurry for the best selection and remember, we'll get you financed at Bob Hall's Greenway Automall next to Wal-Mart in Yakima.
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And all the time I know, land your love and let it grow.
Thanks to Easter Seals Services, my life continues to grow.
We have a chilly week ahead of us. I'll have details tonight at 6.
Before 1980, Mount St. Helens hadn't erupted since 1857, 143 years ago.
That may not sound like that long, but in the world of technology, it's light years.
Earthquakes are a major indicator of volcanic activity and the seismograph used to measure quakes wasn't even invented until 1875.
Well, since the 1980 eruption happened during the technology age, scientists like Ed Klimashouskas have been able to gather more information,
interpret more data, and better predict volcanic activity than scientists ever dreamed possible in the mid-1800s.
The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens was really sort of the catalyst that got things started.
Klimashouskas and a whole team of geologists work here at the Cascade Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington.
Even though they are miles from Mount St. Helens, technology allows them to keep a close eye on the volcano and the others that make up the Cascade Mountain Range.
Probes and sensors are strategically placed on and around the mountains.
They record and report any geologic disturbances. Most days, these seismographs only pick up falling rocks.
You can tell these rockfall signatures very typically they grow slowly.
As you can picture a few rocks beginning to tumble and then it builds up and then it's roaring along down the sides of the crater wall and then it kind of slowly dies out
and the last few rocks coming to rest and then it's over.
If there is any significant seismic activity at the mountain, scientists will know about it in an instant.
Twenty years of study will also tell them if that activity is the start of an eruption.
They know St. Helens very well and they know how she acts before she's about to blow.
They studied her before the May 18th blast, during the eruption, and the 20 years since.
St. Helens helps scientists write the modern day book about volcanoes, how they work, and what signs may indicate a pending eruption.
But St. Helens can only be used as a base of education, not a blueprint.
Dr. Vachowskis says as much as we've learned, volcanoes are still very unpredictable.
Even though we've gotten very good at Mount St. Helens and understanding the patterns at Mount St. Helens that lead to eruptions,
that doesn't necessarily apply directly to other volcanoes either in the Cascades or around the world.
But some of what geologists have learned from St. Helens does apply to volcanoes around the globe.
That became evident nine years ago in the Philippines.
Much like Mount St. Helens, Mount Pinatubo rumbled back to life after several hundred years of dormancy.
The Philippine government turned to the United States for help.
Because it had the expertise and the volcanoes' close proximity to America's Clark Air Force Base,
the U.S. Geological Survey was quick to dispatch its volcano experts to the Philippines.
They set up monitoring sites on Pinatubo and were able to accurately forecast its pending eruption.
On June 16, 1991, the volcano blew.
Thanks to St. Helens and the knowledge gathered there, the damage wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.
This meant that several thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware had been saved.
If that kind of expertise was available in 1980, 57 people may have survived the Mount St. Helens eruption.
And that's why scientists want to learn as much as they can from the St. Helens and Pinatubos of the world.
They know it's not a matter of if, but when, another volcano will erupt near a large population.
Geologists also know it's possible that another cascade volcano will not erupt within their lifetimes.
That's another reason they're studying St. Helens so intensely.
In the case of our cascade volcanoes, if we sat around and waited for the next eruption,
the odds are that most of the people with experience at Mount St. Helens would have passed away
and we would be dealing with a new generation and probably forgotten most of what we had learned.
If the information is not passed on to future generations of scientists, it will be a deadly mistake.
We know based on history, St. Helens and the rest of the cascade peaks will erupt again.
What we don't know is when, how, or how powerful the eruptions will be.
The 1980 blast leveled thousands of acres of landscape, but it was fairly small compared to its eruptions in the past.
Klimaschowska says for all we've learned about Mount St. Helens over the past 20 years, there's a lot we don't know
and a lot we won't know until it erupts again.
We could see renewed dome growth activity. We could see explosive activity or we could see lava flows.
Essentially anything that the volcano has done in the past is fair game for future eruptions.
And the same can be said for the other cascade peaks.
Historic information can only be used as the baseline because the one predictable thing about volcanoes is that they're unpredictable.
They all sort of have individual personalities. They don't all erupt the same way and they don't all erupt on the same time scale or frequency.
And so just like you and me, these volcanoes sort of have their own unique anachronisms and personalities.
Just a few years ago, in 1997, Mount Adams proved that point.
But without warning, the mountain just 50 miles from Yakima surprised geologists with two large debris avalanches.
Huge amounts of rock, mud and ice just fell away from the side of the mountain.
Thankfully it happened in a remote area and no one was hurt.
But it is the crown jewel of the Cascades that has scientists most concerned.
What if Mount Rainier erupted?
Mount Rainier is considered to be the most hazardous of the Cascade volcanoes for several reasons.
For one, because of the fact that it's generated very large mud flows, which would travel great distances.
And for two, because there is a large population density encroaching upon the volcano.
If Mount Rainier erupts, geologists predict mud flows similar to those that scoured the Tuttle River Valley, but much bigger.
There is geologic evidence of previous Rainier eruptions that sent debris all the way to Seattle.
If that happens, towns and cities along the way like Orting, Anumclaw and Puyallup could be wiped out.
In an effort to prevent such widespread disaster, scientists are working to become the best they can be at predicting volcanic eruptions.
Their work at St. Helens has helped, but until they are 100% accurate, they at least want an early detection plan to give people some warning.
The USGS has been working with Pierce County to assemble a series of sensors around Mount Rainier.
The problem with volcano warnings in general is that you don't have a lot of second chances.
If you issue a false alarm, credibility tends to go out the window.
And the second time, even if you know it's a real event, people are going to be less likely to listen.
Can you imagine the force it would take to upend a tree this large? It's really pretty incredible.
Well, a lot of a warning system is still a ways off.
So scientists are working hard to learn all they can from the Cascade Range's most active volcano, Mount St. Helens.
They've logged volumes of information so far, but scientists believe the next period of discovery may teach even more.
In some senses, it's even more fascinating to me now than it was then.
CAP-TV compiles a quarterly report on our programming efforts to serve the educational and informational needs of children in the Channel 35 viewing area.
These reports are part of our public inspection file, which is open to public view during regular business hours.
To view those reports or contribute your comments to them, contact our Vice President and General Manager Darryl Blue at CAP-TV, 1610 South 24th Avenue, Yakima, Washington, 98902.
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With these deals come Monday night, they'll be out of here.
Hurry for the best selection and remember, we'll get you financed at Bob Hall's Greenway Auto Mall next to Wal-Mart in Yakima.
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I think there's a lot left to do at Mount St. Helens.
No one knows that more than Peter Frenzen. He first came to Mount St. Helens as a researcher in 1980.
Now he oversees all of the science that takes place on the National Volcanic Monument.
He says scientists have to take advantage of the opportunity this volcano has provided us.
He says nowhere on Earth could man do what nature has done here.
If you were to say to somebody, I would like to blow down 230 square miles of forest,
I would like to cover 23 square miles of river valley with an average depth of 150 feet and then let a river erode its way through it,
I would like to, well that's not enough, I think maybe for another 5 or 10 square miles in front of the crater,
maybe we should heat it to about 1200 degrees and sterilize it so we're absolutely sure that nothing survived.
So if you kind of think of this as a natural laboratory where all ranges of disturbance have been created
and then you have an opportunity to watch nature's recovery process, it becomes an enormous scientific opportunity.
Nature researchers keep working here and ensuring that their findings are preserved for future generations.
But Mount St. Helens isn't just for scientists and researchers.
Frenzen says this volcano teaches all of us about the planet we live on.
Nature has created not only a laboratory for science, but it's created an enormous classroom for students of all ages.
We have many, many visitors that come here.
It's a very great place to see kind of geology spread out before your eyes and then to really understand how forests recover
and how ecosystems rebuild themselves through time.
Scientists have watched Mount St. Helens as she has begun to repair herself over the past 20 years
and they will continue to keep a close watch on her.
But we cannot forget the lives forever changed by May 18, 1980, a day at the Northwest and many of its residents will never forget.
And we figure we're very lucky to be here today.
It certainly changed the lives of Ty and Marianna Kearney.
While they've always loved the mountains, they returned to Mount St. Helens more than any other.
We come up here quite often and we like to tell the people what happened.
If they have some questions or something, we don't exactly put out a sign.
If you put a sign on our car, you know, ask us, but we don't know it all either.
You know, I think anybody that's been through this kind of experience, they say the same thing, that little things don't matter so much.
I mean, it gives you, I mean, when we were driving out that day, I was describing that to an art teacher later, our van.
I tried to do drawings of our van coming out of there, but it's just impossible to try to picture that experience.
And I said, you were so tiny, you were so little, and the mountain is so immense,
and you realize the power of the mountain when it unleashes such a blast, you know,
and devastates all these miles of forest and everything. It gives you a different perspective.
Covering the Mount St. Helens story catapulted Craig Allen's career.
Within months, he was promoted to news director at CAP TV, then moved to Colorado Springs and Denver soon after.
He still credits Mount St. Helens and Yakima for his success.
I've been away now for 20 or so years, but inevitably when you say Yakima, when you say you were in Yakima,
at some point people will say, were you there for the Mount St. Helens eruption?
And I happily can say, yes, I was indeed there.
There are clearly some lessons, and that is when things are tough, people pull together,
and so we came through it, I think, from a social point of view.
Economically, wheat crops, dryland wheat crops, were much better because we had all of this new,
even though it was an inert material, added to the soil, and so that soil held water better than it had for some period of time.
I think we also learned never to know what to expect next when you're living along this chain of fire
known as the Cascade Mountain Range.
Sid Morrison says the aftermath of Mount St. Helens is one of the largest challenges he's faced in all his years of public service.
And I think the investment we've made in the follow-up really will serve future generations very well.
I think the Northwest can be proud of the way we dealt with this chain of fire.
Pride is what Yakima City Manager Dick Zase feels as well.
He's often called on now to help cities across the globe.
Last year he traveled to New Zealand and lectured on dealing with volcanic activity.
I think I'm on the short list of the folks to call for some ideas, experience,
and some of the details of what it takes to work through an effort of recovery from a volcanic eruption.
Just like that librarian told him on the day of the eruption,
Yakima is now the model for modern cities and their recovery from the effects of a volcano.
Zase says that's knowledge he's privileged to have.
I hope that I don't have to ever go through this again, but having been through it and learned as much as I have,
I'm pleased to be able to impart whatever knowledge and experience I have to others and other locales and other places
and to know that that would be a contribution to helping them be better prepared for such an event.
It's a good feeling and something that I will probably always do all my life.
Even 20 years later, Zase is constantly reminded of his own volcano experience,
whether it's the can of ash sitting on his bookshelf or a drive by Chesterly Park where thousands of tons of ash was dumped.
One recent reminder came as a complete surprise as he was cleaning his house preparing for a move.
And in the middle of this stack of papers was a little report I wrote on volcanoes.
And here I was six years old writing this report and drawing a diagram of how a volcano works.
And I thought about that and I said how prophetic that I would have done that at six years of age
and never fully realized that someday I would be dealing with what I was learning when I was six years old.
So many lives have been changed by this wounded giant and we've learned so much from her already.
The truth is we don't know when she will awaken again. All we do know is that one day she will.
So until then, scientists will continue to work here, people will visit, communities will grow,
and as long as this area remains protected, the plants and animals will continue to regain a hold here.
Mount St. Helens is a tribute to the power of our Mother Earth.
And while we may not be able to completely understand her, the mountain has taught us to respect her.
From Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, I'm Alex Peach. Thanks for watching.
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